A surefire way to lose my sympathy—even in a situation in which one party is indie developers working on passion projecs, and the other party is almost cartoonishly villainous CEO John Riccitiello—is to issue a death threat. If you think a death threat is just a way to express how much you care about something, you're wrong. Death threats aren't punctuation marks, dummies.
The death threats probably came from Tim Cook since Unity decided to torpedo developers right before the Vision Pro launch and Unity is the engine Apple has been promoting for Vision Pro app development.
Yeah I was thinking about how annoyed Apple must be about Unity cratering their own reputation. Their terrible relationship with Epic precludes any Unreal Engine partnership as well.
It's very interesting that Apple has been increasingly emphasizing high-end games, starting with the Apple Silicon Macs, and just recently with the iPhone 15 Pro. Apple buying Unity is not out of the question. They don't have a lot of other attractive options.
Exactly. For any kind of large contentious issue, there will always be weirdos "on your side". Nobody can control the weirdos. It's deeply disingenuous to act like some anonymous fringe troll is representative of the larger group.
We've been living in the global internet age for the past ~25 years, this shouldn't be a shock to anyone.
Not necessarily, but they could have an interest in spotlighting death threats written by individuals not in the industry (gamers) to showcase how everyone rallying against one of their actions is bad: which is precisely what happened to the OP of this chain.
> they could have an interest in bringing death threats written by individuals not in the game development industry
Sure? It’s still a death threat.
Sending employees home has a real cost. The existence of death threats, moreover, is unlikely to change developers’ hearts and minds. The nuttier ones will write it off as a conspiracy theory. Most will see it as irrelevant to their interests.
People who make death threats don’t need to underwrite their insanity. Their incoherence doesn’t make them less dangerous.
I don't think there is any conspiracy or "psyop" involved in writing fake threats or sending people home for PR points in this case, but I'd be pressed to change my opinion over nutjobs (in this case, probably gamers) being violent.
I would suggest that every company over a certain size gets a certain number of death threats.
If, hypothetically, a company just managed to piss off, I don't know...everyone, one strategy to garner some cheap sympathy and have an excuse to cancel public gatherings might be to highlight some of those they were getting all the time anyway.
> every company over a certain size gets a certain number of death threats
Citation needed. I’ve never worked at a firm that received a death threat. If we did, I would expect it to be taken very seriously by senior management and law enforcement.
> I’ve never worked at a firm that received a death threat. If we did, I would expect it to be taken very seriously by senior management and law enforcement.
You expect it would be? IOW, you wouldn't automatically be told about a death threat, so you wouldn't know if the company received a death threat.
I've worked for at least two companies that received "death threats"; I've also worked with folks who were individually stalked, unrelated to their job.
Most "death threats" are vague and unsubstantiated: some (pseudo) anonymous e-mail threatening general violence. They're so common that most companies (and the police) ignore them.
A _specific_ threat will usually get reported to and acted upon by the police, but that often requires naming an individual person and something else, like a specific place or a weapon or such.
As a general statement, I would agree with the person who wrote above, "that every company over a certain size gets a certain number of death threats."
> you wouldn't automatically be told about a death threat, so you wouldn't know if the company received a death threat
I would, in the last ten years.
> Most "death threats" are vague and unsubstantiated: some (pseudo) anonymous e-mail threatening general violence
These (e.g. “I hope you all die*) aren’t typically referred to as death threats. Any one of naming a target, specifying a method or stating personal intent (versus generally hoping harm befalls one) qualifies as a death threat.
> These (e.g. “I hope you all die*) aren’t typically referred to as death threats.
"I hope" is not a threat. I specifically said "threatening general violence".
Someone (pseudo) anonymously e-mailing "I'm going to kill you all," is generally considered a threat in the US, though it's usually ignored because it's vague and unsubstantiated.
Without knowing what "threat" Unity received, it could have been anything.
In the past ten years, has your company (companies?) received general threats of violence? Not "I hope", but "I will"?
> Someone (pseudo) anonymously e-mailing "I'm going to kill you all," is generally considered a threat in the US, though it's usually ignored because it's vague and unsubstantiated
Sure. Add any one of a weapon, day or time, location or person and it becomes a specified threat.
> Without knowing what "threat" Unity received, it could have been anything
I agree. But again, it’s a video game company. The cost of deferral is low. Even if it were an “I’m going to kill you all” threat, deferring until investigated is prudent. And if a company takes a threat seriously, law enforcement will, too.
> In the past ten years, has your company (companies?) received general threats of violence? Not "I hope", but "I will"?
He isn't. He is saying that if a company simply says they have received death-threats from someone or some people, then his view of the entire community changes, and he aligns himself with the company. If the community consensus was to encourage their members to make these types of threats, then he would have more standing. It isn't.
> his view of the entire community changes, and he aligns himself with the company
That never happens. Self interest trumps notions of decency. (Particularly in the context of just a threat, regardless of how credible.)
Is the timing convenient for management? Sure. Never let a crisis go to waste. Does that make their actions imprudent? Of course not. They’re a video game company. These aren’t stakes worth gambling against lives.
If you can’t sympathize with the people making death threats, you are not sufficiently invested in the problem, and should probably not be passing judgement.
> If you can’t sympathize with the people making death threats, you are not sufficiently invested in the problem
I can sympathise with someone while acknowledging they should go to jail, and also sympathising with the people they’re attacking for taking prudent safety measures.
My guess is that it's just some immature gamer, not an actual developer. All gamers aren't immature, but there's always some immature base group of them doing absolutely stupid stuff.
Unity’s the one making death threats: the proposed changes threaten the livelihoods of the customer base — the food in people’s mouths and the roofs over their heads.
They have all the interest in the world in playing this aspect down and playing up the inevitable reaction to backing human beings into an existential corner: fight, flee, or freeze. In shock, someone says “you come after me, I can come after you, too.” Blaming them is beside the point: you don’t want death threats made to you? Don’t make them to others. It’s pretty simple.
If this is “a surefire way to lose my sympathy,” you never had any sympathy in the first place.
> Update: San Francisco police told Polygon that officers responded to Unity’s San Francisco office “regarding a threats incident.” A “reporting party” told police that “an employee made a threat towards his employer using social media.” The employee that made the threat works in an office outside of California, according to the police statement.
This seems strange as a major corporation should be able to provide security to protect against death threats. And it should be the exact same security it provides normally for any large employee gathering.
Assuming that death threats actually took place and they were actually credible.
Seems silly for a company to not be able to act because of death threats. That seems like a viable reason for an individual or a very small dev, but it seems like there’s a now a way to just stop Unity from doing stuff.
Cynically, I assume they just don’t want the negative PR and wanted a reason to cancel.
> This seems strange as a major corporation should be able to provide security to protect against death threats. And it should be the exact same security it provides normally for any large employee gathering.
"A large employee gathering" for a lot of companies happens every day in the office. How much security presence does the average office have, in your experience? In mine, the answer is not that much. I've never seen enough that I'd think the same level would be enough for death threats outside of things like defense contractors or military. Everywhere else it would be pretty easy to walk in, shoot the front desk people, take their badge, go anywhere in the building.
My current employer has armed
security guards. It’s pretty big with over 10,000 people with each physical location having 1,000+. Guards check badges and vehicles.
Before that I worked for a fortune 100 company and our regional office was in a shared office building that had receptionists and 1-2 armed guards who kind of roamed. They weren’t always visible but they were usually in the lobby.
And I worked for startups they had no one at all and just a door with a key and then keycard scanner.
I’ve visited google and Microsoft’s campuses and they have pretty strict security. So I think it’s a size and budget thing.
It would be extremely difficult to walk into my employer, shoot the front desk people and take their badge.
There's a reason people use the phrase "out of an abundance of caution": it means they don't really think the risk is significant enough to do anything, but they know they'll be blamed if something goes wrong after they didn't cancel.
> We have to have some amount of bravery in the face of implausible risks
It’s a video game engine. They help make video games. They’re sending employees home, to continue working from home, and cancelling a town hall. These are stupid stakes to gamble against lives while a death threat is being investigated.
Yeah, sorry, unless I had more details in the articles that could convince me that the threat was credible, I'm going to fall back on my reasonable assumption that there is no actual risk here, just perceived risk.
> there is no actual risk here, just perceived risk
Which is fine for you, a bystander with no impact. If you’re management, on the other hand, you don’t get to wait for evidence of credibility. Because that evidence may come in blood-stained walls.
here;s the update. TL;DR there was no credible threat, it was internal to the company and non-local. "The officers took a courtesy report" which is to say, there was no credible threat.
"""When officers arrived on scene, they met with a reporting party who informed them that an employee made a threat towards his employer using social media. The reporting party also said that the employee works at an out of state location for the company, but that they had been unable to reach the outside jurisdiction to make a report.
The reporting party was advised to contact the jurisdiction in which the incident occurred, and officers took a courtesy report."""
HN User Dekhn, I have to say, you sound willfully argumentative at this point.
You've taken the rhetorical position of fighting a rear guard action against common sense to support your point that the town hall should go forward. Your arguments have actually done more damage to that cause than good. And with these death threats, the cause of going forward with a town hall was already being viewed askance even before your rhetorical 'help'.
How about it seems silly to issue death threats over something so unfuckingbelievably inane?
from the outside, the gaming universe seems to be comprised of some of the most atrocious people on the planet. Astounding levels of vitriol/violence/crybaby behavior, week after week in the news.
Also silly: forgetting that a group is not its worst members.
Remember that every single group with which you identify has had unstable members who behaved badly. Whether criminal behavior, death threat, bullying, or plain poor decisions, there are reprehensible people who superficially share your interests, appearance, background, or gender.
Consider the availability bias: extremes are notable (easily recalled), and so become outsized in evaluations.
Example: It is likely that any given random violent crime was committed by a man. Some are therefore convinced that all men are violent on average, even though it is quite unlikely for any random man to be violent.
Did I say that every person in the gaming community is awful? Your comment that “not everyone is bad” is both obvious and meant to deflect criticism of the culture that obviously dominates the gaming world. As another commentator said, go join any FPS and turn on voice chat —- it has been this way at least since I got into online gaming 18 years ago. Based on my own experience and what makes it to the news, the situation is getting worse.
Misogyny, racism, and verbal abuse has been the norm since day one. Now you have that plus swatting, doxxing, and affiliated real-world harassment.
Nothing about this needs defending with platitudes about “not all gamers!” Everyone knows it’s not all gamers. That doesn’t mean, as you’re attempting to suggest, that the gaming universe doesn’t have serious and unique problems.
You did actually accuse me of "forgetting that a group is not its worst members," which would indeed be tantamount to saying everyone in the gaming community is awful.
Anyway thank you for the pointer that groups are groups, I guess? Not sure what you were trying to add to the conversation.
> Not sure what you were trying to add to the conversation.
That is disappointing.
There is one common factor with all of the toxic communities, forums and chat rooms that formed your impression of "the gaming universe" over 18 years. When you figure out what that common factor is, you will definitely find the many non-toxic, welcoming and inclusive gaming communities out there.
Yes, of course it’s terrible for someone to issue death threats over anything, much less software prices.
Threats of violence are wrong and illegal.
But companies should have security in place to protect their buildings for large gatherings. And that security should be able to reasonably protect against jerks who give death threats.
They have 7000+ employees. They are a huge company. If they are having big meetings with 500-1000 and don’t have sufficient security then that’s not smart.
It is normal. Look around next time you’re at a tech conference. There’s probably armed guards somewhere. I went to WWDC 10 years ago and they had security. Same for SXSW.
Pretty much any mass gathering.
Unity isn’t some small org. They are worth billions and are a target even in normal times where people aren’t death threating them.
Of course, I agree that life shouldn’t be like this, but it is. We’re already in a low-trust society. We’ve been in it for decades.
Remember when Timothy McVeigh blew up just a regular federal building and killed normies and kids and whatnot? I think since then there’s been a lot more security. It’s more likely that Timothy McVeigh would be shot and killed if he was detected and tried to blow up his truck this time.
This is sad. And I’d prefer not if society could fix this so it’s not necessary.
But if I was going to a big all hands with a thousand coworkers and my employer didn’t have security that could protect me from some rando showing up with a gun, I wouldn’t go to that all hands. And I would probably not work for that company.
Not for any ideological reason. Just because I don’t want to die.
What hell is this?
Private security can try to detain and deter people who are acting out of line but they are not equipped or legally able to deal with lethal force. That is a job for the police. This incident highlights just how rare it is that people make these kind of threats and how disruptive they can be. But there is also a clear moral imperative to take action when lives are being threatened, and this is exactly why we have taxes and laws and police.
> private security guards who are armed, trained, and legally able to deal with lethal force are common all over the world
Not in most of the developed world. And legally, rarely in America.
For that [EDIT: dealing lethal force] you need to hire off-duty cops. And I would think thrice before working in an office that felt it needed off-duty cops on hire. (I would also vote for more police. Security is a public good.)
Not so. Armed security guards are indeed legal and licensed to carry firearms in almost all US states[1], as well as in almost all European Union states[2], Japan[3], Australia[4], and Canada[5].
So, in nearly the entire 'developed world,' security guards can indeed carry guns.
For an example, here is California's regulatory site: https://www.bsis.ca.gov/industries/guard.shtml -- California, one of the most notoriously anti-gun states -- allows properly licensed security guards to arrest people, as well as to carry tear gas, batons, and firearms.
> individuals have the lawful right to defend themselves up to and including using lethal force
But not to run into a room to dispense it. If the armed guard happens to be under threat, yes, they can shoot to kill. But if someone starts shooting inside while they’re at the door, their legal rights are typically restricted to apprehension.
> But if someone starts shooting inside while they’re at the door, their legal rights are typically restricted to apprehension.
This is simply not true. Most states that regulate armed security guards have a duty to protect. It’s part of the training they receive and licensure to be able to carry a weapon for their job as an armed security guard.
Also, in most states, a private citizen carrying a weapon can who is just a bystander is legally allowed to use lethal force to protect other people and even if that means to run into a room and dispense it.
I think what may be confusing you is that guards can’t just blast for anything (like cops can). But if there’s someone with a gun drawn (or other lethal weapons) then it’s basically open season for anyone to kill that person to eliminate that threat.
Most people won’t seek out danger if they hear gunshots or see something. But armed guards have that as their job.
If I hire a security guard who is licensed to carry a gun and they don’t intervene if some psycho is waiving a gun around then that guard is doing a bad job.
Guards with guns are very different from the mall cop type people who you see as loss prevention officers that can’t do much. But they aren’t there to protect you from harm, they are there to reduce shoplifting.
> states that regulate armed security guards have a duty to protect
Source? Duty to protect doesn’t even apply to cops in America.
> it’s basically open season for anyone to kill that person
And if they miss and hit someone else? There is no liability shield for them as there is for cops. This is why there are virtually no examples of armed security subduing a shooter. It’s randos or cops.
Maybe I’ve fallen for cops’ marketing. But when hiring for events in four states, moonlighting LEOs come with an advertised advantage of being able to pull a trigger without thinking twice.
> We are introducing a Unity Runtime Fee that is based upon each time a qualifying game is downloaded by an end user. We chose this because each time a game is downloaded, the Unity Runtime is also installed.
It would be one thing if Unity were hosting the game on their infra, but I still have to pay Unity a fee if I host the download on my own website?
> For my money, the most interesting part of the whole Unity debacle is that by a strict reading of the new policies, ceasing to offer one's Unity-based games for sale won't even work as a means of getting around the fees: if your Unity-based game is no longer available for sale after January 1st, you'd still be on the hook for the Unity Runtime installation fee for new installs performed by previous legitimate purchasers, even in cases where such installs are performed from physical or archival media or are otherwise impossible for you to prevent.
Certainly that can't be enforceable. There's no agreement to the terms, in fact a tacit disagreement and loss of profit by the developer/storefront.
This all feels like Unity is pushing an obviously terrible concept so they can back down to a slightly-less-terrible one and look slightly more reasonable. I'd bet they will switch to a larger per-sale fee after a little longer of people making noise.
IANAL but it doesn't pass the sniff test. You can't provide a module to a software, change terms retroactively and request to be paid $10b per install for old versions of the software and bankrupting all your customers. That's preposterous.
Yours is a common reaction. Even many indiedevs (in the gamedev discords I am in) could not believe the implications. Unity's policy is so silly it is hard to believe.
Unfortunately, the leadership at Unity does not agree with you.
Unity's core selling point was a pay-per-seat fee with no royalty. Hence a decent number of big productions went with Unity over Unreal. Now Unity wants more money, and thinks said big productions are "free loading". It is as if an all you can eat buffet decided they should charge for entry plus per plate. "But a lot of customers come in, pay one fixed fee, then eat a lot of food" said the employees of the all you can eat buffet. "Other restaurants charge 20$ a plate. We are simply asking for the same.", said the employees of the all you can eat buffet.
> the leadership at Unity does not agree with you.
I'm interested in how the courts would rule on it. I can't imagine courts siding with an agreement change, without consideration for the other party, and applying to games developed in the past retroactively.
I'm sure that there are a lot of Internet-empowered and recent-political-era-inspired mentally ill people who will make death threats casually. It's sad and shameful.
But did Unity not want to do the town hall over videoconferencing (if offices shut), or was there some other reason that they didn't want to do the town hall?
But, I also wouldn't be surprised if leadership doesn't have great answers to the questions their employees would have asked if the meeting had happened.
Anyone (or any company/organization) can find enough crazies out there willing to send death threats (or to just be saying mean things they pretend are actual threats, stuff like "I hope you die in a fire") to avoid any uncomfortable interactions with the piblic or their userbase.
That said, this was a thing well before the internet. I used to work at a TV and radio station, and the head of security had his office right next to us in IT. Any letters sent to our on air talent were filtered through him first, and a huge amount had stamps on the outside of the envelope saying "This letter was sent from a correctional facility" along with the name of the institution. Lots of letters ranging from creepy to outright threatening. I didn't regularly get to see them so I couldn't give you any hard numbers, but one thing I noticed that made me skeptical of claims that women get harassed/threatened more than men is that our weatherman by himself got about as many creepy letters as most of our female talent combined.
The perception that women are harassed/threatened more is probably differentiated from your experience by a couple factors:
1. It includes people who are not broadcast figures, which is the vast majority of people. It's possible that, in public, in the workplace, and in school, a woman is more likely to be harassed than a man.
2. The nature of harassment/threats against women is probably biased towards the more emotion-provoking (sinister, intimidating, sexual, etc). I.e. the kinds of things that tend to engender more concern, in the sense of how bad it feels to imagine/witness, how likely it is to come to something more, the likelihood of a power imbalance (physical or otherwise), and its long-term effects on the recipient.
> I'm sure that there are a lot of Internet-empowered and recent-political-era-inspired mentally ill people who will make death threats casually. It's sad and shameful.
Most of these people probably released shitty furry dating games for 1,99€ on Steam, so nothing new.
Yet another reason why development should only take place on FOSS game engines. If a company has hostile/incompetent C-level management, community forks it and maintain it as free use.
The features offered by commercial engines are lightyears ahead of FOSS engines, especially at the high end.
If you're running a commercial game studio in such a brutally competitive market as video games, how can you afford to use FOSS? Your choices are go without high-end features that your competitors do have; or divert resources from your game content to build them in-house. Both seem less attractive than "just buy a commercial engine" to many studios.
Lots of studios still build engines from scratch for this very reason: get exactly what they want and avoid vendor lockin. A good FOSS engine that gets them 50% of the way there for free? Seems like a pretty good deal to me. So long as the engine can be extended to get the features they want, it makes sense to use a FOSS one instead of building from scratch.
Also, inhouse tooling will need to be built regardless, whether the engine is commercial, in house from scratch, or FOSS.
If the studios give back to the FOSS engine source code, it creates a virtuous cycle, like with the Linux kernel. Everyone wins.
Okay I was talking about this with a few friends because it’s now a “debacle” and actually did the math. Unity is cheaper than Unreal across the board whether you release a $70 AAA or a $5 indie experiment. And that’s with worst case numbers. It’s even cheaper if you’re a pro or enterprise user.
On my napkin: for a $30 indie title at the 200k install threshold it washes out to be a 0.67% “revenue share”. Unreal charges 5%.
So can someone show me the math where indie devs are getting screwed? How is this possibly so bad that people are sending “credible death threats” to the CEO?
Or is the issue just the attempt to apply the terms retroactively? That I understand. If Unity said “going forward this is pricing, we aren’t going to retroactively apply the runtime fee to installs prior to Jan 1, 2024”, would the fuss die down?
I don't think just saying "hey it is still cheaper than unreal so what is the problem?"
There are now new fees that people didn't have to pay previously. I.e. devs used to use unity and now they still use unity but have to pay more than they did before. Unreal might not even factor in for them.
Indie devs potentially make negative profits at the best of times. That doesn't make death threats (even "credible" ones...) ok though. Just use Godot and move on.
When McDonalds increases the price of a McDouble the messes don’t send death threats to the CEO. Something that used to cost X increasing in price and now costing 1.2X is not unethical. I’m just trying to understand what it is in this case that has people up in arms. I think the answer is the attempt by Unity to apply retroactive pricing.
I think more than anything it is the nickle-and-dime frustration of being charged multiple times along the way. It would be more like if McDonalds charged per bite instead of per sandwich. Even if the final bill isn't much different, it changes one's eating habits and likely makes the whole experience less enjoyable in the end.
With Unity, users don't like the new labrynthian TOS. It doesn't help that multiple times people have said "I need to pay if I release a free to play game?" And Unity has clarified "no, that isn't what we meant, you won't need to pay for those." It is either on the Unity legal team for writing the terms so poorly or the marketing team for translating them poorly. Either way, trust has been lost. If Unity builds in a legal back door to charge later for phantom installs or retroactive usage or whatever, that makes an operational risk that devs might want to avoid.
Also, separately, the masses will send idle death threats for nearly anything. Given a large enough consumer base, idle death threats will be sent for any change (even a positive one) or no change at all. I'm guessing that McDonalds' CEO doesn't make noise about it when it happens.
I uninstall/delete and then at some point in the future redownload/reinstall games all of the time on both iOS and Steam. In fact Apple does the delete for me with some games automatically. Why should the developer of the game be charged a fee each time I do this?
Yeah i definitely see both sides of this issue. In the end i'd bet 95% or more of the revenue changes from this big model is going to come from large game studios anyway.
What i think people aren't getting is Unity probably implemented the per install fee in anticipation of the Apple vision pro. An extremely large amount of vision pro apps are going to be using Unity because of the new partnership with apple.
My understanding is that a large number of Unity installs are mobile games, and a lot of those are free to play with microtransactions. So we're not talking $30 earned per user. We're not even talking $1 earned per user. We're talking, in some cases, less than $0.01 earned per user (on average), since some users have paid nothing to play the game.
There's also the fact that Unity charging "per install" also includes things like game demos (which are free), or games given to subscribers of things like PlayStation Plus, where the creator is paid a fixed amount upfront based on an estimate of how many people will download the game--but, if more people download the game than originally estimated, then you could end up losing money thanks to Unity.
> There's also the fact that Unity charging "per install" also includes things like game demos (which are free), or games given to subscribers of things like PlayStation Plus,
I've read that Unity clarified that this doesn't apply to Demos (but mistakes happen) and they would charge the platform MSFT/ Sony/ etc. for subscriber stuff -- which, oh yeah, pick that fight with MSFT & Sony, so smart.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 251 ms ] threadhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37510958 - Video-Game Company Unity Closes Offices Following Death Threat
It's very interesting that Apple has been increasingly emphasizing high-end games, starting with the Apple Silicon Macs, and just recently with the iPhone 15 Pro. Apple buying Unity is not out of the question. They don't have a lot of other attractive options.
We've been living in the global internet age for the past ~25 years, this shouldn't be a shock to anyone.
You’re alleging Unity fabricated these death threats?
Sure? It’s still a death threat.
Sending employees home has a real cost. The existence of death threats, moreover, is unlikely to change developers’ hearts and minds. The nuttier ones will write it off as a conspiracy theory. Most will see it as irrelevant to their interests.
People who make death threats don’t need to underwrite their insanity. Their incoherence doesn’t make them less dangerous.
If, hypothetically, a company just managed to piss off, I don't know...everyone, one strategy to garner some cheap sympathy and have an excuse to cancel public gatherings might be to highlight some of those they were getting all the time anyway.
Citation needed. I’ve never worked at a firm that received a death threat. If we did, I would expect it to be taken very seriously by senior management and law enforcement.
You expect it would be? IOW, you wouldn't automatically be told about a death threat, so you wouldn't know if the company received a death threat.
I've worked for at least two companies that received "death threats"; I've also worked with folks who were individually stalked, unrelated to their job.
Most "death threats" are vague and unsubstantiated: some (pseudo) anonymous e-mail threatening general violence. They're so common that most companies (and the police) ignore them.
A _specific_ threat will usually get reported to and acted upon by the police, but that often requires naming an individual person and something else, like a specific place or a weapon or such.
As a general statement, I would agree with the person who wrote above, "that every company over a certain size gets a certain number of death threats."
I would, in the last ten years.
> Most "death threats" are vague and unsubstantiated: some (pseudo) anonymous e-mail threatening general violence
These (e.g. “I hope you all die*) aren’t typically referred to as death threats. Any one of naming a target, specifying a method or stating personal intent (versus generally hoping harm befalls one) qualifies as a death threat.
"I hope" is not a threat. I specifically said "threatening general violence".
Someone (pseudo) anonymously e-mailing "I'm going to kill you all," is generally considered a threat in the US, though it's usually ignored because it's vague and unsubstantiated.
Without knowing what "threat" Unity received, it could have been anything.
In the past ten years, has your company (companies?) received general threats of violence? Not "I hope", but "I will"?
Sure. Add any one of a weapon, day or time, location or person and it becomes a specified threat.
> Without knowing what "threat" Unity received, it could have been anything
I agree. But again, it’s a video game company. The cost of deferral is low. Even if it were an “I’m going to kill you all” threat, deferring until investigated is prudent. And if a company takes a threat seriously, law enforcement will, too.
> In the past ten years, has your company (companies?) received general threats of violence? Not "I hope", but "I will"?
No.
That never happens. Self interest trumps notions of decency. (Particularly in the context of just a threat, regardless of how credible.)
Is the timing convenient for management? Sure. Never let a crisis go to waste. Does that make their actions imprudent? Of course not. They’re a video game company. These aren’t stakes worth gambling against lives.
I can sympathise with someone while acknowledging they should go to jail, and also sympathising with the people they’re attacking for taking prudent safety measures.
They have all the interest in the world in playing this aspect down and playing up the inevitable reaction to backing human beings into an existential corner: fight, flee, or freeze. In shock, someone says “you come after me, I can come after you, too.” Blaming them is beside the point: you don’t want death threats made to you? Don’t make them to others. It’s pretty simple.
If this is “a surefire way to lose my sympathy,” you never had any sympathy in the first place.
> Update: San Francisco police told Polygon that officers responded to Unity’s San Francisco office “regarding a threats incident.” A “reporting party” told police that “an employee made a threat towards his employer using social media.” The employee that made the threat works in an office outside of California, according to the police statement.
Assuming that death threats actually took place and they were actually credible.
Seems silly for a company to not be able to act because of death threats. That seems like a viable reason for an individual or a very small dev, but it seems like there’s a now a way to just stop Unity from doing stuff.
Cynically, I assume they just don’t want the negative PR and wanted a reason to cancel.
"A large employee gathering" for a lot of companies happens every day in the office. How much security presence does the average office have, in your experience? In mine, the answer is not that much. I've never seen enough that I'd think the same level would be enough for death threats outside of things like defense contractors or military. Everywhere else it would be pretty easy to walk in, shoot the front desk people, take their badge, go anywhere in the building.
Before that I worked for a fortune 100 company and our regional office was in a shared office building that had receptionists and 1-2 armed guards who kind of roamed. They weren’t always visible but they were usually in the lobby.
And I worked for startups they had no one at all and just a door with a key and then keycard scanner.
I’ve visited google and Microsoft’s campuses and they have pretty strict security. So I think it’s a size and budget thing.
It would be extremely difficult to walk into my employer, shoot the front desk people and take their badge.
Also you don’t want that on your conscience? Your colleagues’ lives and wellbeing against a corporate town hall.
It’s a video game engine. They help make video games. They’re sending employees home, to continue working from home, and cancelling a town hall. These are stupid stakes to gamble against lives while a death threat is being investigated.
Which is fine for you, a bystander with no impact. If you’re management, on the other hand, you don’t get to wait for evidence of credibility. Because that evidence may come in blood-stained walls.
What do you think a death threat entails?
"""When officers arrived on scene, they met with a reporting party who informed them that an employee made a threat towards his employer using social media. The reporting party also said that the employee works at an out of state location for the company, but that they had been unable to reach the outside jurisdiction to make a report.
The reporting party was advised to contact the jurisdiction in which the incident occurred, and officers took a courtesy report."""
You've taken the rhetorical position of fighting a rear guard action against common sense to support your point that the town hall should go forward. Your arguments have actually done more damage to that cause than good. And with these death threats, the cause of going forward with a town hall was already being viewed askance even before your rhetorical 'help'.
from the outside, the gaming universe seems to be comprised of some of the most atrocious people on the planet. Astounding levels of vitriol/violence/crybaby behavior, week after week in the news.
Also silly: forgetting that a group is not its worst members.
Remember that every single group with which you identify has had unstable members who behaved badly. Whether criminal behavior, death threat, bullying, or plain poor decisions, there are reprehensible people who superficially share your interests, appearance, background, or gender.
I mean, have you joined the voice chat for a popular shooter recently? There is a lot of vitriol and crybaby behaviour.
Example: It is likely that any given random violent crime was committed by a man. Some are therefore convinced that all men are violent on average, even though it is quite unlikely for any random man to be violent.
Misogyny, racism, and verbal abuse has been the norm since day one. Now you have that plus swatting, doxxing, and affiliated real-world harassment.
Nothing about this needs defending with platitudes about “not all gamers!” Everyone knows it’s not all gamers. That doesn’t mean, as you’re attempting to suggest, that the gaming universe doesn’t have serious and unique problems.
No, and no one said you did. For the second time, argue what someone says.
> Your comment that “not everyone is bad”
Here you even put quotes around something no one wrote.
Anyway thank you for the pointer that groups are groups, I guess? Not sure what you were trying to add to the conversation.
That is disappointing.
There is one common factor with all of the toxic communities, forums and chat rooms that formed your impression of "the gaming universe" over 18 years. When you figure out what that common factor is, you will definitely find the many non-toxic, welcoming and inclusive gaming communities out there.
By the way the police announced that the death threats came from a Unity employee and not from a member of the "gaming community".
https://www.polygon.com/23873727/unity-credible-death-threat...
Threats of violence are wrong and illegal.
But companies should have security in place to protect their buildings for large gatherings. And that security should be able to reasonably protect against jerks who give death threats.
The descent into a low-trust society is hurried along by commentary like this, so no, no thank you. It's not normal and it should not become normal.
It is normal. Look around next time you’re at a tech conference. There’s probably armed guards somewhere. I went to WWDC 10 years ago and they had security. Same for SXSW.
Pretty much any mass gathering.
Unity isn’t some small org. They are worth billions and are a target even in normal times where people aren’t death threating them.
Of course, I agree that life shouldn’t be like this, but it is. We’re already in a low-trust society. We’ve been in it for decades.
Remember when Timothy McVeigh blew up just a regular federal building and killed normies and kids and whatnot? I think since then there’s been a lot more security. It’s more likely that Timothy McVeigh would be shot and killed if he was detected and tried to blow up his truck this time.
This is sad. And I’d prefer not if society could fix this so it’s not necessary.
But if I was going to a big all hands with a thousand coworkers and my employer didn’t have security that could protect me from some rando showing up with a gun, I wouldn’t go to that all hands. And I would probably not work for that company.
Not for any ideological reason. Just because I don’t want to die.
Not in most of the developed world. And legally, rarely in America.
For that [EDIT: dealing lethal force] you need to hire off-duty cops. And I would think thrice before working in an office that felt it needed off-duty cops on hire. (I would also vote for more police. Security is a public good.)
So, in nearly the entire 'developed world,' security guards can indeed carry guns.
[1] Time magazine even wrote about this a few months ago: https://time.com/6275440/insecure-private-security-replacing... -- it says that "about 30" states even allow guards to be licensed as "private police" with full arrest powers.
For an example, here is California's regulatory site: https://www.bsis.ca.gov/industries/guard.shtml -- California, one of the most notoriously anti-gun states -- allows properly licensed security guards to arrest people, as well as to carry tear gas, batons, and firearms.
[2] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/use-firearms-private-security...
[3] https://dannychoo.com/archive/en/posts/firearms-in-japan
[4] https://multisectraining.edu.au/do-security-guards-carry-wea...
[5] https://novage.ms/canadian-laws-security-guards-need-to-know...
Now look up authority to dispense lethal force. Much more limited compared to police.
It’s a peculiar argument you are making attempting to make it seem like only only law enforcement officers are allowed to use lethal force.
But not to run into a room to dispense it. If the armed guard happens to be under threat, yes, they can shoot to kill. But if someone starts shooting inside while they’re at the door, their legal rights are typically restricted to apprehension.
This is simply not true. Most states that regulate armed security guards have a duty to protect. It’s part of the training they receive and licensure to be able to carry a weapon for their job as an armed security guard.
Also, in most states, a private citizen carrying a weapon can who is just a bystander is legally allowed to use lethal force to protect other people and even if that means to run into a room and dispense it.
I think what may be confusing you is that guards can’t just blast for anything (like cops can). But if there’s someone with a gun drawn (or other lethal weapons) then it’s basically open season for anyone to kill that person to eliminate that threat.
Most people won’t seek out danger if they hear gunshots or see something. But armed guards have that as their job.
If I hire a security guard who is licensed to carry a gun and they don’t intervene if some psycho is waiving a gun around then that guard is doing a bad job.
Guards with guns are very different from the mall cop type people who you see as loss prevention officers that can’t do much. But they aren’t there to protect you from harm, they are there to reduce shoplifting.
Source? Duty to protect doesn’t even apply to cops in America.
> it’s basically open season for anyone to kill that person
And if they miss and hit someone else? There is no liability shield for them as there is for cops. This is why there are virtually no examples of armed security subduing a shooter. It’s randos or cops.
Maybe I’ve fallen for cops’ marketing. But when hiring for events in four states, moonlighting LEOs come with an advertised advantage of being able to pull a trigger without thinking twice.
It’s more common than you think. That’s why there are armed private security laws and regs.
Looks like there are 239,000 in the US [0]. This doesn’t include law enforcement.
[0] https://www.zippia.com/armed-guard-jobs/demographics/
It would be one thing if Unity were hosting the game on their infra, but I still have to pay Unity a fee if I host the download on my own website?
> For my money, the most interesting part of the whole Unity debacle is that by a strict reading of the new policies, ceasing to offer one's Unity-based games for sale won't even work as a means of getting around the fees: if your Unity-based game is no longer available for sale after January 1st, you'd still be on the hook for the Unity Runtime installation fee for new installs performed by previous legitimate purchasers, even in cases where such installs are performed from physical or archival media or are otherwise impossible for you to prevent.
This all feels like Unity is pushing an obviously terrible concept so they can back down to a slightly-less-terrible one and look slightly more reasonable. I'd bet they will switch to a larger per-sale fee after a little longer of people making noise.
Unfortunately, the leadership at Unity does not agree with you.
Unity's core selling point was a pay-per-seat fee with no royalty. Hence a decent number of big productions went with Unity over Unreal. Now Unity wants more money, and thinks said big productions are "free loading". It is as if an all you can eat buffet decided they should charge for entry plus per plate. "But a lot of customers come in, pay one fixed fee, then eat a lot of food" said the employees of the all you can eat buffet. "Other restaurants charge 20$ a plate. We are simply asking for the same.", said the employees of the all you can eat buffet.
I'm interested in how the courts would rule on it. I can't imagine courts siding with an agreement change, without consideration for the other party, and applying to games developed in the past retroactively.
Yes -- and by most copyright laws, _of course_.
Bob builds his game using Software X. Regardless of where Bob's game is hosted, he has to pay for Software X according to its license terms.
Unity is being unreasonable on 10000 avenues, but Where It's Hosted isn't one.
But did Unity not want to do the town hall over videoconferencing (if offices shut), or was there some other reason that they didn't want to do the town hall?
But, I also wouldn't be surprised if leadership doesn't have great answers to the questions their employees would have asked if the meeting had happened.
That said, this was a thing well before the internet. I used to work at a TV and radio station, and the head of security had his office right next to us in IT. Any letters sent to our on air talent were filtered through him first, and a huge amount had stamps on the outside of the envelope saying "This letter was sent from a correctional facility" along with the name of the institution. Lots of letters ranging from creepy to outright threatening. I didn't regularly get to see them so I couldn't give you any hard numbers, but one thing I noticed that made me skeptical of claims that women get harassed/threatened more than men is that our weatherman by himself got about as many creepy letters as most of our female talent combined.
1. It includes people who are not broadcast figures, which is the vast majority of people. It's possible that, in public, in the workplace, and in school, a woman is more likely to be harassed than a man.
2. The nature of harassment/threats against women is probably biased towards the more emotion-provoking (sinister, intimidating, sexual, etc). I.e. the kinds of things that tend to engender more concern, in the sense of how bad it feels to imagine/witness, how likely it is to come to something more, the likelihood of a power imbalance (physical or otherwise), and its long-term effects on the recipient.
Most of these people probably released shitty furry dating games for 1,99€ on Steam, so nothing new.
If you're running a commercial game studio in such a brutally competitive market as video games, how can you afford to use FOSS? Your choices are go without high-end features that your competitors do have; or divert resources from your game content to build them in-house. Both seem less attractive than "just buy a commercial engine" to many studios.
Also, inhouse tooling will need to be built regardless, whether the engine is commercial, in house from scratch, or FOSS.
If the studios give back to the FOSS engine source code, it creates a virtuous cycle, like with the Linux kernel. Everyone wins.
On my napkin: for a $30 indie title at the 200k install threshold it washes out to be a 0.67% “revenue share”. Unreal charges 5%.
So can someone show me the math where indie devs are getting screwed? How is this possibly so bad that people are sending “credible death threats” to the CEO?
Or is the issue just the attempt to apply the terms retroactively? That I understand. If Unity said “going forward this is pricing, we aren’t going to retroactively apply the runtime fee to installs prior to Jan 1, 2024”, would the fuss die down?
user installs the game on their pc? unity wants the fee paid for that
same user installs it on their laptop? pay again
same user upgrades their pc and has to install the game again? unity wants their install fee
I believe they also initially said that deinstall + install would incur another charge, but backpeddalled there (weird)
There are now new fees that people didn't have to pay previously. I.e. devs used to use unity and now they still use unity but have to pay more than they did before. Unreal might not even factor in for them.
Indie devs potentially make negative profits at the best of times. That doesn't make death threats (even "credible" ones...) ok though. Just use Godot and move on.
With Unity, users don't like the new labrynthian TOS. It doesn't help that multiple times people have said "I need to pay if I release a free to play game?" And Unity has clarified "no, that isn't what we meant, you won't need to pay for those." It is either on the Unity legal team for writing the terms so poorly or the marketing team for translating them poorly. Either way, trust has been lost. If Unity builds in a legal back door to charge later for phantom installs or retroactive usage or whatever, that makes an operational risk that devs might want to avoid.
Also, separately, the masses will send idle death threats for nearly anything. Given a large enough consumer base, idle death threats will be sent for any change (even a positive one) or no change at all. I'm guessing that McDonalds' CEO doesn't make noise about it when it happens.
What i think people aren't getting is Unity probably implemented the per install fee in anticipation of the Apple vision pro. An extremely large amount of vision pro apps are going to be using Unity because of the new partnership with apple.
There's also the fact that Unity charging "per install" also includes things like game demos (which are free), or games given to subscribers of things like PlayStation Plus, where the creator is paid a fixed amount upfront based on an estimate of how many people will download the game--but, if more people download the game than originally estimated, then you could end up losing money thanks to Unity.
I've read that Unity clarified that this doesn't apply to Demos (but mistakes happen) and they would charge the platform MSFT/ Sony/ etc. for subscriber stuff -- which, oh yeah, pick that fight with MSFT & Sony, so smart.
So an horrible market is dying. Good.